I'm curious about a true, pragmatic "Space Transportation System" to be happily used by both USAF and NASA (rather than the shotgun wedding of STS), using information know to people in the early 70's, but assuming enough foresight to have forseen some of the issues that would come of STS and to have turned a bit different direction.
How about S-ID as a lift vehicle for anything that needs a lift uphill. Capacity about right, only one stage and one kind of engine. Would need a new pad to west coast, though. And for crews a smaller orbiter that is light enough to get to LEO without external tank, maybe using J-2S with internal hydrolox tanks if extra capacity was needed.
So I was more thinking about a new rocket that was neither "Saturn" or "Titan" per se, but something new for both
Still not workable. The contractor would be pulled in two different directions. ELV's can support multiple users now because they are contractor owned and operated. One of the biggest problems that the USAF had with the shuttle was that NASA managed it. There is no way around this in the 70's. One organization would be in charge and the other would be subservient to the other. Thats how it worked on all the other launch vehicles of the 60's and 70's. There wasn't much mixing. NASA had SCOUT, Delta, and Centaur and the USAF had Titan, Agena, Atlas and Thor. If one agency wanted to use the other's vehicle, they worked through the other agency. There was little crossover, a mission here and there and the payload agency knew they had to work through the other and follow its processes.
Ok, I think we've established that bureaucratically this couldn't happened, unfortunately.
Quote from: Lobo on 02/04/2015 04:49 pmOk, I think we've established that bureaucratically this couldn't happened, unfortunately.And there's the main problem! See it should have come down to a simple turf-war... Really. Between the USAF and NASA they both had enough SCA members in the crowd... Pick a spot and duke it out (pun intended )...Winner manages the STS program and looser... Gets Pittsburgh! Oh wait that's a different war all together...Randy
...The company didn't control the configuration of the vehicle, the gov't did.
MSC had their own redundant, independent Saturn V S-IC test stand in Huntsville, separate from the one in Mississippi (see attached). In that era the booster contractor did only what they were told, and numerous MSC personnel were at each contractor location to ensure this happened.
...The MSFC stand wasn't redundant or independent of the Mississippi stand. The Mississippi stand replaced the MSFC due to noise issues.
Why is that? Couldn't the contractor simply build the rockets for one or the other customer, deliver it to them, and hand over control? Suppose that for some reason NASA adopts the Titan as its LV. Couldn't Martin continue to build Titans as normal for the Air Force, for delivery to VAFB/CCAFS and launch from their Titan pads, then build some more and deliver them to Kennedy for processing at the VAB and launch from LC-39 for NASA? Why would either organization have to talk to each other at all outside of where they would do so whether or not they happened to be launching the same vehicle, or when deciding on which vehicle to procure?
Who is going to control the design of the rocket? What is going to be the basic rocket, will it be manrated or designed for performance? Back in the 60's and 70's, the gov't ran the program office for the launch vehicles, there was no commercial launch services. The company didn't control the configuration of the vehicle, the gov't did.
Well, politics and beuacracy aside, ...
I was speaking of the historic viewpoint of hands-on ownership and control by Von Braun's team and how this created a totally different situation back then for contractual issues. I think that was your point -- booster contractors back then were much less independent than today and MSFC exercised an extreme degree of oversight.In Von Braun's own words he described his view of the MSFC vs MTF facilities in the early 1960s: "Studies indicate that as far as noise level is concerned, there will probably be no objection to firing up eight F-1 engines at MSFC...The Mississippi Test Facility is still a cow pasture...and cannot compete with any test stand availability dates in Huntsville....MTF should therefore be considered an acceptance firing and product improvement site for Michoud rather than a basic development site". (Werhner Von Braun: His Life and Work).That same book described the the in-house capability at MSFC as "..much like a large aerospace company...they could design, test and build rockets or almost any other kind of aerospace hardware...with its capability to make prototypes and test components, the Structures and Mechanics lab in itself had capabilities comparable to a rocketry corporation...the Center was almost like a space agency in miniature."With booster contractors on that tight a leash and overseen by people who could build their own rockets, they would not independently design and build their own LV for a speculative new customer -- the government was the customer.
-NASA experiment tries parachute and dunk recovery of first stage and fails. Eventually NASA builds a test vehicle for first stage downrange or RTLS vertical landing based off a core modified with some landing rockets.
SpaceX amazing people-ism aside, why would you make the assumption that this would in fact "fail" as NASA had a much deeper background and knowledge on how to MAKE this work than SpaceX did? The specifically worked on making the Saturn-C/1 stage at least "recoverable" to study if not actually make reusable.